The phoney war is over. Nearly a year after the election, the parties it propelled to the fore, the one as majority government, the other as official Opposition, are at last about to engage. Later this month, the Conservatives, having spent the past few months tidying up some unfinished business from the last government, will deliver a budget that by all accounts will define the current one. The week before, the NDP will elect a new leader, and in the process define themselves: ideologically, regionally, tonally. Together, the two offer a prism through which to view our politics over the next four years, and the forces that will shape it.

It is clear, first, that natural resources, notably oil, are emerging as the primary fault line in Canadian politics, assuming commodity prices remain at their present, historically high levels. The fundamental question is whether the enormous wealth this represents is an asset to be managed, or a problem to be solved. (It's both, of course, but politics has a way of turning complex questions into binary choices.) The Conservatives have plainly nailed their colours to the mast as the defender of the resource industries, and of the regions that depend upon them.

The NDP, just as surely, is preoccupied with the problems of resource wealth, from global warming to the costs a high "petro dollar" impose on other sectors. The leadership race has seen a parade of candidates in various states of anguish that Canadian resource firms should be selling their raw logs or unrefined bitumen to foreigners, rather than diverting them — presumably at a lower price — into domestic processing. Whether prompted by concern for the central Canadian manufacturing industries that employ many of the party's union supporters, or simply a belief that "mere" resource extraction is undignified, the party invariably sees higher resource taxes — to "internalize" environmental costs, to discourage exports, to divert revenues into a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund — as the answer.

That is also a position attractive to many Liberals. Whatever its merits or demerits as policy, it amounts to ceding the resource-producing areas of the country to the Conservatives. Once, that might have been thought to mean Alberta. Today it means most of the West — the richest, fastest-growing parts of the country. Increasingly, it will mean Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, too. Effectively, then, a politics of resources-as-a-problem is a politics focused on Quebec and, to a lesser extent Ontario.

I say to a lesser extent, because the Tories successfully laid claim to almost 70 per cent of Ontario's seats in the last election, versus the five they were able to extract from Quebec. This was a remarkable turn, given the difficulties the province has endured of late: Given a choice, Ontario cast its lot with the West and the Tories, rather than the East and the opposition. It may lack the West's resource abundance, it may indeed be currently in receipt of equalization payments, but the province still sees itself as a wealth-producer rather than a wealth-distributor, and to that extent it was more attuned to the Tories' tax-cutting message than the opposition's.

And this brings us to the second emerging fault line, to be exposed in the March 29 budget and in subsequent federal and provincial exercises. The late recession may be the proximate cause of the intense fiscal pressures every government is under, but the aging of the population will keep the heat on for years, indeed decades to come. Among other things, this is going to lead to demands from the wealthier provinces for a redrafting of the terms of fiscal federalism, including not just health and social transfers, but equalization, employment insurance and much else — with Ontario leading the charge. The arguments are all there in the Drummond Report.

Such a debate is likely to be polarizing, not just on regional but ideological lines. So it will be interesting to see how the opposition parties position themselves. The choice of Thomas Mulcair as NDP leader, for example, might be considered a smart play of the Quebec card. But will the party tolerate a centrist in the job at a time when the Conservatives are slashing spending? And will he be credible opposing cuts that, had he accepted the Conservatives' reported offers to recruit him, he might have implemented himself?

Suppose the NDP do choose a Quebec leader. Is it not likely the Liberals, looking at the Tory lock on the West/Ontario, will also place their bets on Quebec, hoping the NDP's breakthrough in the province was a one-time fluke? And yet both parties must be aware that sitting atop the latest polls in Quebec is . . . the Bloc Quebecois. It may be that we are entering an era in which, rather than throw its support heavily behind one party or another as it has in the past, Quebec divides its seats among three or four of them.

The resurgence of the separatist movement (the Parti Quebecois also leads in provincial polls) opens up yet a third potential fault line, with consequences no one can foresee. But suppose the Liberals, or some coalition of non-separatist parties, form a government after the next provincial election, probably in 2013. On the premier's desk is a proposal to allow drilling for shale gas, which the province is reckoned to have in vast quantities, but the exploitation of which has until now been shelved owing to environmental concerns, or rather environmental politics. With the election safely out of the way, can there be much doubt the proposal will be revived? Given the kind of fiscal straits Quebec is in?

You want to talk about altering the political landscape: Quebec as fossil fuel producer?